British company WIREWAX, which specializes in making moving image interactive including the formerly seismic progression of making them directly shoppable, has been leading the field since it launched in 2010 to the extent it’s experienced 100% growth in the last three years alone. It does so, and this is the abridged layman’s explanation, by using a cutting edge browser software to add clickable hotspots to videos, channeling the viewer to another product or service - even bios, unseen footage or alternative storylines. Its clients straddle fashion, finance, music and news media groups including British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and The Guardian. It's also wooed retailers such as German e-commerce giant
Zalando and luxury fashion force MatchesFashion with whom it’s just signed a two year deal to produce all its interactive content. As the list infers, its success is founded on an ahead-of-the-curve, trans-industry belief that similar goals - personalization, undisrupted engagement, live interaction and a smooth route from inspiration to purchase - drive universal success.

WIREWAX’ major game-changer in the last two years, reveals Callanan, was the addition of a “friction minimizing” shopping basket concept that apes traditional e-commerce by allowing people to continue browsing (in this case viewing) undisturbed until they’re ready to check out. The software effectively connects to a brand’s product feed API (internal program interface) so that the data is entirely up-to-date and only available items are shunted through. Originally trialled with British fashion brand Ted Baker, it’s a shift that’s sent conversion rates soaring; consumers are 3 times as likely to buy a product with that type of integration involved than with a video where a clickable link extracts the viewer, even if momentarily. With Ted Baker, in the first week of the video being live on its site, it sold $70,000 worth of clothing tracked through the video.

It’s a breakthrough that’s opened the shoppable commerce door from a crack to wide open, begging the question: where best to place branded content anyway? The answer may be surprising. While there’s a considerably large school of thought that advocates going to wherever the consumer is most regularly found (i.e. any social media platform you care to name) according to Callanan the juiciest spot for real traction is actually a brand’s own website, resurfacing the value of an e-commerce site as the brand destination: “Videos on retailers’ sites get better traction, which is testament to the level of blurring between shopping and entertainment but also because of the different level of engagement you see once someone’s effectively stepped over the brand’s threshold. 67% of the audience will interact with a video on a brand’s site but only 35% if they come to it elsewhere, such as on Youtube. It’s therefore key to attract people to your own site.”

The most appropriate analogy is that rather than just meeting consumers where they play, meet them, get persuasive and then take them home with you . Callanan cites a concept by Dutch/British brand Dulux called Colour Rebels as exemplary. “Dulux was entirely happy to pump serious marketing spend into the project but instead of spending it on pushing people towards Youtube what it did was create an interactive video for its own site and then used the marketing budget to drive people to it from social media, particularly Pinterest [the social media platform of choice for interiors enthusiasts].” Dulux sold out of the testers pots accessed by clicking hotspots and 25% of all viewers stayed on and watched additional Dulux content. “Why would you spend so much on sending people to a different destination, somewhere that’s not your own?” says Callanan. “Going to where the consumer is does have value, of course, but there’s so much additional value to be had in pulling people out of the noise.”

Personalization, in an increasingly in-depth manner, is where WIREWAX is motoring, in response to what Callanan says, “is the way in which viewers elsewhere, such as TV, are being empowered to choose different outcomes, to go down various rabbit holes.” It’s already begun in a relatively pedestrian yet operationally astute way, reimagining processes such as discounting. It’s already worked with brands including British high-street fashion chain
Next and Zalando on a tool that recognizes where people have previously interacted with a video several times but not taken the bait (clicked a hotspot), subsequently upping the ante with a pop-up, time-sensitive discount.” It’s a rather satisfying tip to know, the opposite of the reputed Ryanair anti-incentive whereby the more times a flight is viewed, the more the cost increases.

Stepping this up, thanks to the deployment of (permission-granted) third-party data, will be videos whose content dialogue and prompts will change based on the viewers’ locations (at base level this could mean the weather) or potentially the cultural nuances of the region they’re in. Such outlying connections will extend the understanding involved, beyond the relatively limiting world of past purchase histories. The more immediate and perceptive the ‘reading’ of the viewer - including, for instance, what they are currently engaging with on social media - will flesh out the relevance.

Personalization at this level is effectively travelling into the world of live (ultra-responsive and real-time) commerce - another increasingly valuable focal point for brands. WIREWAX is currently working with a major British TV chef on a project to launch in September 2018 that Callanan describes as a, “kind of cook-a-long experience” - that appears to resemble a de-naffed, freshly-interactive upgrade on vintage
QVC. According to Callanan, “You'll be able to press a button to stop the commentary as you want to and at that point the video won’t stop but you may, for instance, see the chef tapping his fingers on the counter top. Additionally, because the system will know what you’ve bought before there may be a prompt for the chef to say, ‘you’ll need that pan that you bought last month for this next bit’. The possibilities are massive and ongoing as we plug into more third-party data beyond the brand itself.”

WIREWAX is also in the early stages of toying with how to allow people to have live discussions while watching videos. Sure, these in-play water cooler moments may already be happening via WhatsApp or
Twitter during TV viewing, but the goal is to remove the extra channels, keeping it all with the domain of the video and boosting the sense of undisrupted intimacy.

The possibilities for interactive moving image will grow even further as technologies such as artificial intelligence and computer vision (highly advanced image recognition tools) converge in earnest, creating what Callanan describes as “heavy duty data meshing.” This will, for instance, allow for products to be tagged in real-time, such as during live TV - the software would essentially recognize what was appearing on-screen and attribute the relevant hotspots automatically. It will, says Callanan, require some manual labor to begin with to check that the tech-allocated spots are correct, but it’s just one person, no need for a team. The hard graft will be done by the tech, the connections ready to go.”

Katie Baron is an author, strategist & futurist specializing in the intersections between consumer behavior, brands, tech and pop culture. She's also Head of Retail at Stylus Media Group

I’m a journalist, author & brand strategist who specialises in defining and predicting the intersections between technology, pop culture and consumer behaviours. Dissecting all aspects of retail engagement from digital commerce and brand comms to spatial design I’m curre...